Rapidly changing electronic content such as news content, web log (“blog”) content, real-time messaging content, social networking content, and other media, present challenges for search engines. Search engines have been well-tuned to find relevant information for short search queries by leveraging technologies to identify keywords or phrases in a search string. Documents believed to be relevant to the search string may be identified using natural language processing, content matching, document link structure, usage analysis, and/or other user interaction patterns.
Search engines that search real-time data (“real-time search engines”) need to evaluate rapidly changing content that has a different link structure, usage, interaction, and linguistic patterns than those found in other web sources. In an effort to identify and provide the most relevant documents for a search query, some real-time search engines rely upon keywords and/or phrases, and organize returned search results on the basis of the time the content associated with the search result was created. Such methods are generally viewed as adequate, as the most recent ideas on a topic can be presented as the first results for a submitted query.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.